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Capitol C

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About Capitol C

  • Birthday July 30

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    Male
  • Location
    Washington DC
  • Interests
    Classical music, old houses (mine is from the 1860s), food and wine, physics (I'm lucky that my job is also an interest!)

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  1. I bought my 3as in 1972 in unfinished pine because it saved me some money. I think the savings was $50 each, but it might have been $50 for the pair, perhaps someone still has an old price list. That doesn't seem like much, but I was working summers when I was off from college and earning $1.75 per hour, so it was a lot to me. I originally stained them and finished them with a mix of oil and shellac ("French polish"). A few years ago I filled a few small scratches in the wood, very lightly sanded, and painted them black to go with more modern furniture. I figure that I can change that in the future, either going back to the original pine, or even putting on walnut veneer myself. No matter what the finish, they still sound fine!
  2. I apologize, I have no idea why I wrote Sergio! Well, unless it has something to do with my age. My house is from about 1865, but for some reason the floors do not bounce very much. The walls are brick, and the floor joists go into holes in the brick walls. Maybe since the house is only 5.5 meters wide, and the joists are 7.6 cm by 23 cm of old-growth "heart pine", the floors are pretty rigid. Even though I listen to mostly CDs, I enjoy vinyl, too. You should put that wall shelf high on your list of things to do!
  3. I think one advantage that we had was that music reproduction in our youth was awful. (For reference, I was born in 1952). I recall the Magnavox mono record player that belonged to my parents, and just finished restoring an RCA 45 player for a friend to refresh my memory. We were lucky enough to hear things like AR speakers against that background, and the difference was stunning. That sealed my interest in stereo, and having good equipment made it possible to appreciate better music. By contrast, relatively inexpensive headphones and on-line sources sound pretty good. Maybe "good enough" is the enemy of great. Whatever the reason, I'm not worried; other people's loss doesn't really affect me.
  4. PS: Sergio, my wife is from Salerno. Way down south relative to you, but still from the country that produces the best food, wine, and women!
  5. A late reply to your topic: I restored the AR 3as that I bought around 1972 (thanks to the excellent restoration guide posted on this site!), but was disappointed with the results vertically on stands in my largish living room. I tried lots of things, moving the chairs and hassock out of the room, lowering and raising the thick curtains, moving the speakers closer together, farther apart, closer and farther from the windows, and nothing helped--the sound was kind of anemic. I was wondering if I'd messed up the restoration, but the speakers sounded the same when they were next to each other, so if I messed something up, I did it twice.Then I moved the speakers to my library on to built-in bookshelves, and the difference was remarkable. They are closer to the listener, but probably most importantly they were made to be placed on bookshelves. The bass goes deep, the treble is sharp, they are just as satisfying as I remember them being when they were new. I also bought, with my wife's encouragement, a pair of GoldenEar Triton 2+ speakers for the living room, and they sound fantastic, too. They are also very forgiving about room placement and nearby furniture. I have to say, though, that choosing between the ARs on shelves or the GoldenEars on the floor would be difficult, the are both very satisfying. More bass on the GoldenEars, but the difference isn't very much on most music.
  6. I just spent some time today tracing down an interesting problem with the pots on my 3as while trying different treble and midrange settings. When I restored the speakers, I replaced the pots with new ones which tested fine on the bench. For some reason, one of the tweeter pots doesn't like to be on the maximum treble position, with the wiper all the way to one side. If I back it off very slightly, so it is touching the winding, it is fine, and it varies smoothy up to that point. On the maximum position, the treble level drops noticeably. It is an easy problem to avoid if you are aware of it, but I thought for a while something was wrong with one of the drivers.
  7. I've been listening to my restored AR-3a's for some time now, and noticed something interesting. On chamber music and jazz, things sound great. On orchestral recordings, things are more mixed. I have done a lot of fiddling with positions in the room, the speaker-back midrange and tweeter controls, and the receiver tone controls. There seemed to be a slight lack of fidelity on high-pitched notes and sharp transients--flutes and piccolos are not sibilant, triangles get lost in the orchestra, etc. I thought it might be the room, or the replacement tweeters, or just my 63 year old ears (and 40 year old memories!). Turning the midrange and tweeter controls to the max helped, and so did some use of the treble control on the receiver, but different recordings seemed to want different adjustments. Oddly, a local radio station recording of a live National Symphony Orchestra concert seemed very good without fooling around with controls. Today I listened to the mid-1950s recording of Daphne and Chloe by Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I have a record of it, but ordered a re-release on SACD, which I listened to on a CD player. It was originally a two-channel recording, and the liner notes say that the master has splices in it, but otherwise wasn't mixed or otherwise altered. A few minutes into the CD, I turned the treble control on the receiver back to flat, and heard the speakers as I remembered them. The detail is remarkable, everything sounds right. So maybe I didn't mess up the restoration after all! As I knew decades ago, it is very hard to record an orchestra, and often less is more. The old RCA and Mercury recordings with minimal miking and mixing, or an FM live broadcast with a couple or three fixed microphones, are often superb. Nothing profound in this post, but I am really enjoying the music!
  8. I went to graduate school with Ike Blonder's son, and got to meet Ike many times. He was a very interesting and very smart guy. The first high-end system I ever listened to consisted of 5 AR-1Ws and three Janszen Model 130s, two woofers for each channel and one for a center channel, and of course one tweeter each for the rest. My memory (from the late 1960s) is that is sounded wonderful , listening to a wide range of classical music. I don't, sadly, recall the electronics. The guy who owned it had two rooms dedicated to the system, one small room for electronics, the other for the speakers. His second (living room) system was two AR-3s that AR had converted to 3as, driven by the original AR integrated amplifier. Has anyone had any experience with the Janszens, are they restorable if they can be found?
  9. I forgot to post a link to Amazon, http://www.amazon.com/80-20-Quick-Square-Profile/dp/B00J3VBFCO. You can get them in different lengths. I couldn't find the black anodized frames at Amazon, so Outwater is a good bet. I made a simple jig for a band saw, then smoothed the ends on a milling machine, but I think with care you could cut the stuff with a hack saw , it is just anodized aluminum, if you used a jig. I used a flanged version for the tops of the stands, http://www.amazon.com/80-20-Square-Single-Flanged/dp/B00J3WC23O/ref=sr_1_5?s=industrial&ie=UTF8&qid=1446673989&sr=1-5&keywords=80%2F20+9005, and dropped a piece of fiber board in making the top into a table so that the speakers wouldn't fall down if they slipped a little. Again, they come in various lengths.
  10. In addition to the notes from Kimmo and VintageMan, I received a welcome from JKent, who suggested I post anything that might be of interest to others. I did a fairly standard job, using AR Teledyne 12000840 tweeters with the recommended parallel inductor. I've done a little experimenting with room position, but found (as I remember from the past) that the positions can be changed within reason and the speakers still sound very good.. The one unusal thing that I did was to refinish them. I bought the unfinished pine cases to save $50 a pair in 1971 or 72; at the time, I was earning $1.65 an hour in a summer job and that was a lot of money. When I first bought them I stained and then put a coating of shellac and oil ("French polish".) The look didn't work with the living room, my wife and I had just finished buying nice black and white modern furniture, so Ipainted the speakers and the stands that I made black to go with the decor. This was at my wife's request, but to tell the truth we both like the furniture and good music reproduction, and I like how they came out. The stands were pretty inexpensive, made from a extruded aluminum called 80/20 that you can buy on Amazon. ( The straight pieces can be cut to any length, and the corners are tapped into the aluminum making a very tight fit. It allows you to make the speakers any height that you want, and to change the height later by replacing the vertical pieces. I've attached a picture to show speaker plus stand look like.
  11. I want to thank Roy Champagne, Ken Kantor, Minh Luong, John O'Hanlon, Bret Thiel, and Tom Tyson for their great Restoring the AR-3a document. I used it to fix the problems in a pair which I originally bought in 1971 or 72; they had off-spec capacitors, bad pots, one torn woofer foam, and a tweeter that didn't sound right and had too low an impedance. I'm an experimental physicist and not a bad guy around electronics, but I doubt that I would have gotten things right without their guidance--at best it would have been a lot harder and much more time consuming. Everything--the schematics, photos, production history, organization, and writing--is top notch.
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